The USGS announced on Thursday the founding of the California Volcano Observatory, CalVO* for short. CalVO is tasked with monitoring a wide swath of U.S. territory that covers California and Nevada, all being run out of the USGS office in Menlo Park. This means that the Long Valley Observatory is no more and a number of Cascade volcanoes in Northern California get taken up by CalVO and away from CVO (which is now officially in charge of volcanoes in Oregon, Washington and Idaho) – think of CVO and CalVO like the Saruman and Sauron of volcano observatories (or, technically, as Eruptions reader Jim points out, Orthanc and Barad-dûr). This reorganization is born out of the National Volcano Early Warning System (NVEWS) that hopes to unify volcano monitoring response across the country.

* With CVO (Cascade Volcano Observatory) already taken, I suppose they could have called it CaVO, but Cascades starts with “Ca” as well, so CalVO it is. Maybe they could have gone with GSVO for “Golden State Volcano Observatory.”

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